Philippe Roland’s drawings on exhibit at Gerardo Ruiz Gallery

By Marie Moébius

Drawing is to the arts what the understructure is to a building: a support. In the teaching of the fine arts, drawing is the foundation of all the other disciplines. Before painting, sculpture, or even photography, the academy develops a student’s drawing technique, particularly human figure drawing.

Drawing from a living model is, in fact, an imperative exercise in every school of arts. One can claim it’s the classical Greek tradition still influencing us, or perhaps the need to know the body first in order to represent the textiles that will cover it.

To emphasize the importance of drawing, Philippe Roland, professor of plastic arts with experience at numerous institutions including the Autonomous University of the State of Morelos, puts it this way, “One single drawing is worth more than any speech.”

The paper works of Philippe Roland are currently being exhibited at the Gerardo Ruiz Gallery. This is a great opportunity to get to know the work of an academic and artist of great craft and talent.

A series of workshops are also being offered for beginners and advanced artists.

To review Roland’s drawings is to venture into his search for the right gesture in order to give birth to bodies, infinitely. Roland frequently compares the cartoonist with a samurai who seeks perfection in his discipline, by using his pen as a sword.

Think of the paper sketch of a house designed by an architect like Le Corbusier: in a few strokes, it not only makes clear the proportions, openings, angles, and curves of a project but also its sensitivity, its intentions. What happens here that can not express a precise technical level? Is it that the drawing, the stroke, is a form of writing and in this sense supports the thought it sparks?

Oh, the importance for an artist of saving one’s sketches! They constitute a reserve of emotions, a place to find emotion on the days where there is little inspiration. After all, how much paper does an artist go through in order to achieve, in one immediate gesture, the essence of what he observes?

Roland must have gone through a lot of paper in order to get, in mere strokes of coal, the hints of movement you can see in his work—bodies that practically fall off the paper, muscles that one can almost see shake.

Do not forget that the line does not exist in nature; the artist uses it to create the illusion of the three dimensions on a flat surface—a complete invention.